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country we have the society of the groves, the fields, the brooks, and in London a man may keep to himself, or choose his company as he pleases.

It appears to me that there is an amiable mixture of these two opposite characters in a person who chances to have passed his youth in London, and who has retired into the country for the rest of his life. We may find in such a one a social polish, a pastoral simplicity. He rusticates agreeably, and vegetates with a degree of sentiment. He comes to the next post-town to see for letters, watches the coaches as they pass, and eyes the passengers with a look of familiar curiosity, thinking that he too was a gay fellow in his time. He turns his horse's head down the narrow lane that leads homewards, puts on an old coat to save his wardrobe, and fills his glass nearer to the brim. As he lifts the purple juice to his lips and to his eye, and in the dim solitude that hems him round, thinks of the glowing line

"This bottle's the sun of our table"

another sun rises upon his imagination; the sun of his youth, the blaze of vanity, the glitter of the metropolis, glares round his soul, and mocks his closing eye-lids." The distant roar of coaches is in his earsthe pit stare upon him with a thousand eyes-Mrs. Siddons, Bannister, King, are before him-he starts as from a dream, and swears he will to London; but the expense, the length of way, deters him, and he rises the next morning to trace the footsteps of the hare that has brushed the dew drops from the lawn, or to attend a meeting of Magistrates! Mr. Justice Shallow answered in some sort to this description of a retired

Cockney and indigenous country-gentleman. Hc "knew the Inns of Court, where they would talk of mad Shallow yet, and where the bona robas were, and had them at commandment: ay, and had heard the chimes at midnight!"

It is a strange state of society (such as that in London) where a man does not know his next-door neighbour, and where the feelings (one would think) must recoil upon themselves, and either fester or become obtuse. Mr. Wordsworth, in the preface to his poem of the "Excursion," represents men in cities as so many wild beasts or evil spirits, shut up in cells of ignorance, without natural affections, and barricadoed down in sensuality and selfishness. The nerve of humanity is bound up, according to him: the circulation of the blood stagnates. And it would be so, if men were merely cut off from intercourse with their immediate neighbours, and did not meet together generally and more at large. But man in London becomes, as Mr. Burke has it, a sort of "public creature." He lives in the eye of the world, and the world in his. If he witnesses less of the details of private life, he has better opportunities of observing its larger masses and varied movements. He sees the stream of human life pouring along the streets-its comforts and embellishments piled up in the shops, the houses are proofs of the industry, the public buildings of the art and magnificence of man; while the public amusements and places of resort are a centre and support for social feeling. A playhouse alone is a school of humanity, where all eyes are fixed on the same gay or solemn scene, where smiles or tears are spread from face to face, and where a thousand hearts beat in unison !

Look at the company in a country theatre (in comparison), and see the coldness, the sullenness, the want of sympathy, and the way in which they turn round to scan and scrutinize one another. In London there is a public; and each man is part of it. We are gregarious, and affect the kind. We have a sort of abstract existence; and a community of ideas and knowledge (rather than local proximity) is the bond of society and good-fellowship. This is one great cause of the tone of political feeling in large and populous cities. There is here a visible body-politic, a type and image of that huge Leviathan the State. We comprehend that vast denomination, the People, of which we see a tenth part daily moving before us; and by having our imaginations emancipated from petty interests and personal dependence, we learn to venerate ourselves as men, and to respect the rights of human nature. Therefore it is that the citizens and freemen of London and Westminster are patriots by prescription, philosophers and politicians by the right of their birth-place. In the country, men are no better than a herd of cattle or scattered deer. They have no idea but of individuals, none of rights or principlesand a king, as the greatest individual, is the highest idea they can form. He is "a species alone," and as superior to any single peasant, as the latter is to the peasant's dog, or to a crow flying over his head. In London the king is but as one to a million (numerically speaking), is seldom seen, and then distinguished only from others by the superior graces of his person. A country squire, or a lord of the manor, is a greater man in his village or hundred !

New Monthly Magazine.

EXAMINATION

OF

MR. BURKE AND MR. KNIGHT'S THEORIES ON THE
SOURCE OF THE PLEASURES DERIVED FROM
TRAGIC REPRESENTATIONS.

BURKE, in his "Sublime and Beautiful," has many just and profound observations on the source of tragic pleasure; but, like all other theories on the subject, the one which he has adopted applies not to the remote, or original, but to the immediate, or proximate cause, or rather causes, of this pleasure. When I say they apply to the immediate or proximate causes, I do not mean that they unfold even these; but that he seems to have confined himself to what he considered the immediate agency which produced the effect. In the first place, he very justly rejects the supposition which makes this pleasure arise from "the comfort which we receive in considering, that so melancholy a story is no more than a fiction;" and he equally rejects that which makes it arise from "the contemplation of our own freedom from the evils which we see represented." The reasons which he assigns for rejecting these theories are worth quoting. "I am afraid," he says, it is a practice much too common, in inquiries of this nature, to attribute the cause of feelings which merely arise from the mechanical construction of our bodies, or from the natural frame and constitution of our minds, to certain conclusions of the reasoning faculty on the objects presented to us, for I should imagine, that the influence of reason, in

producing our passions, is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.

It is curious to perceive so profound and metaphysical a writer venturing to acknowledge his suspicions, that "the influence of reason, in producing our passions, is nothing near so extensive as it is commonly believed.” Had Burke ventured a step further, and said decidedly, that reason had no influence whatever in producing our passions, he would have asserted a fact which no weight of authority could disprove, however bold and sceptical it might appear to those who have not learned to distinguish between reason and feeling. In fact, the only influence which reason possesses over our feelings, is that of moderating, or suppressing them altogether. Accordingly, a man who, while he witnesses a scene of distress, begins to reflect on his own happiness in being free from it, is infinitely less moved, and less interested in the fate of the suffering victim, than he who, while he indulges in all those feelings which the scene before him is calculated to excite, makes no reflection whatever, but what unconsciously arises from his sympathy with the distressed.

Burke does not confine the pleasure derived from tragic sources to the stage. Real distress, he thinks, is a source of still greater pleasure than the mere imitation of it, and hence he infers, that the nearer the imitation approaches the reality, the more powerful is its effect. In no case, however, does he admit imitative distress to produce equal pleasure with that which it represents. "Choose," he says, "a day to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have ;

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